by Dave Itzkoff
On February 10, 1976, Robin and the Juilliard faculty came to the mutual agreement that he should withdraw from the school. Though a persistent urban legend has endured that John Houseman dismissed him with his congratulations for having outstripped the school’s ability to educate him—he is supposed to have said in one telling of this tale, “There’s just nothing more we can teach you”—this is almost certainly untrue. Such departures from the Drama Division were routine occurrences, and the wayward students would find their way in the wider world or they would not. “John was very good about letting people go and not saying, ‘Oh, you have to finish the whole thing,’” said Margot Harley. “He was right to let Robin go at that point.”
Other Juilliard instructors who worked with Robin were even less sentimental about his exit from the school. “I think we all felt it was fine that he left,” said Michael Kahn. “It was clear that this particular kind of training wasn’t necessarily what he needed or wanted. He got out of it what he wanted to get out of it, and he didn’t get all of it. There are people who really don’t need the four years, or it’s not the right thing for them. And I always understand that. It’s never upset me, ever, when people say I don’t think this right for me, or I don’t want any more of it.”
For Robin, though, it was yet another plan that didn’t come to fruition, and another three years of education that did not result in a degree. It was time to come home, but at least this time he knew where home was, back in San Francisco, where his parents and his girlfriend would be waiting for him.
3
LEGALIZED INSANITY
Not long after Robin’s return to the Bay Area in the winter of 1976, he and his girlfriend broke up. “She fell into this Marin County thing and just went crazy, got really drugged and crazed out,” he later explained, adding the sound of a crashing rocket. “Things went whoo-oosh.” Robin was stuck living with his parents in Tiburon, a young man sleeping in a teenager’s bedroom, and he fell into what he considered a massive depression. The only place he could find salvation was on the stage, and so he began to explore the local theater scene.
San Francisco, which seemed so strange and foreboding in his senior year of high school, was a diverse, liberal metropolis with a complex ecosystem of theaters, clubs, and nightlife. Performances were happening not only at dedicated playhouses but also at storefronts, restaurants, basements, and almost anywhere you could string up a set of curtains and point a spotlight. Robin’s half brother Todd had set up shop in the Marina District at a bar he called Toad Manner, where the regulars nicknamed the proprietor “Toad,” like the giant top-hatted amphibian whose extended tongue spelled out the bar’s name, and he in turn called them his “Marina maggots.” The clientele ran the gamut from doctors and lawyers to firemen and policemen, to bikers and cross-dressers, to the editorial staff of Rolling Stone magazine. “There was one guy named Beefy, who wore a pillbox hat and a black housedress and had a big black beard,” Robin later recalled. “In San Francisco, that’s kind of like day-wear.”
Robin dabbled in an improvisational comedy group run by The Committee, the institution where Dale Morse, his drama teacher at Claremont, had trained. On Monday nights, when regular sketch shows and classes were not being offered at The Committee’s performance space in the North Beach neighborhood, Del Close, the renegade improv virtuoso from Chicago’s Second City, taught a more serious-minded approach to the art. “We were working on improvisation as—how can I express this?—as a serious investigative form,” said Joe Spano, an actor who studied there. Close eventually left The Committee, but the splinter group lived on as The Committee Workshop, then the Experimental Wing of The Committee, and then simply the Wing.
This was when Robin showed up, but he did not stick around for long. “It was immediately apparent that the form we were using was too restrictive for Robin’s imagination,” Spano said. “He couldn’t work in our format, which was much slower. None of us had wits as quick. We weren’t really doing that kind of comedy. We were trying to work as a team, but I don’t mean he wasn’t a team player. His speed, his wit, and his acuity were cramped.”
It wasn’t ambition, either, that got in the way of Robin’s work with the Wing, Spano said: “I don’t think it was a matter of his aspirations. It was a matter of his nature. His talent was to be Robin.”
In March 1976, Robin made his professional San Francisco theater debut in Harold Pinter’s The Lover, about a husband and wife in a role-playing relationship, at the Gumption, a fringe theater in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district. When its director, Cynthia “Kiki” Wallis, first encountered Robin, she found him so destitute she gave him $100 for his wardrobe. As an actor, he seemed to care more about making the role interesting for himself each night than delivering a consistent performance from show to show. “Serious was very difficult for Robin; to remember what it was he had just done and repeat it, wrenching,” Wallis said. “He did it every performance beautifully, differently—close enough, but fresh.” And sometimes he took it too far: “He had gotten used to getting a laugh and one night he didn’t,” she said. “So then he did a Tarzan thing with his voice, and he got the laugh. I told him after, ‘You got the laugh, but you broke the show rule.’”
Still looking for direction and mentorship, Robin began training with Frank Kidder, who ran a workshop for would-be stand-up comedians in North Beach. Kidder was another former military man, an air force enlistee who ran his program in the basement of the Intersection, a café and arts space established by a three-church coalition. The Intersection took an open-minded approach to programming and offered cabaret, vaudeville, vintage movies, and spoken-word acts, sometimes all on the same bill. The space had started to develop a small following of comedy fans who came to see performers like “Freaky Ralph” Eno, a local fixture who specialized in stream-of-consciousness prose pieces and slightly off-key punk-and-surf-rock pastiches. Don Novello, a recent transplant from Chicago who had grown tired of his advertising copywriting job, came here to try his hand at stand-up, drawn in by the receptive crowds and the promise of even modest compensation.
“Admission cost a dollar and we would split the door,” said Novello, who would later become known as the comedic clergyman Father Guido Sarducci. “You usually got, like, two dollars. The bridge at that time was seventy-five cents. So you could end up making fifty cents. It was no money, but it was all hippies and it was very easy. I was doing a lot of stuff about Watergate and Nixon, and they were on your side. It was talking to the choir.”
Robin’s formative efforts here were character pieces, quaint and juvenile. They included a tongue-in-cheek takeoff on Lawrence Welk, full of the bandleader’s familiar German-accented malapropisms: “Tank you, tank you. Now let’s all get down and get fonky. The boys in the band will now play for you a luffly melody, Chumping Chack Flash. Play that fonky Muzak, white boys. Folks, I want you to know that efery one of the boys in the band is a real motherfocker in his own right.”
Another early bit was a quarterback tripping on LSD, who, instead of calling traditional plays, tells his teammates in a loopy California accent, “Well, hike when the energy’s right.”
It was too early for Robin to be thinking about developing a voice; he was simply trying on the role of the stand-up comedian and finding that he enjoyed it. “It was such a rush the first time I did it,” he later said. “The fun thing was being out there on stage in the total silence. The performance was yours. If you died, it was yours too.”
With his San Francisco peers, Robin was helping to develop a mode of comedy called the “riffing style”: as opposed to organized stand-up routines that proceeded in a logical sequence, this anarchic approach meant that any impulse could be explored at the moment that it occurred, without the need for setup or context, and it could be tossed aside as soon as the next good idea popped up. He took inspiration from more experienced local comics like Jeremy S. Kramer who, he said, “would just go on and do loud, wonderful characters. People would love him
or it would drive people out of the room. There was no middle ground.”
Robin’s theatrical training had given him a voice loud enough that he did not need a microphone to project himself, and he used this to his advantage. “If people started heckling you, you just wade over into the audience and go near their table,” he said. “Or move away from them, and use the other side of the room, and fuck the loud people over here, the drunks at the bar.” Sometimes he would wander into his audience, establishing a trademark move that helped distinguish him from his competitors. “If you were on mike, you did the standard thing where people could kind of lose track,” he said. “So if I didn’t go on mike, they were immediately listening.”
Comedy offered Robin a personal outlet, a release valve that could help him get past his demoralizing breakup. And it paid just enough that Robin felt he could support himself; if he pushed himself and hustled hard, he could scrape together as much as $25 a night. “I was self-sustaining,” he explained, “and I could say, ‘No, Pop, I don’t need that check, but thanks.’” Yet he couldn’t seem to gauge for himself how naturally he took to this strange new discipline. Lorenzo Matawaran, another aspiring comedian who also studied with Kidder and became a friend of Robin’s, recalled, “Robin got up and blew everyone away, but he was meek.… He’d do a monster set and then come sit down and ask us in that little voice, ‘Did I go over?’”
Robin had come into comedy at an auspicious moment. Stand-up was entering its awkward adolescence; it was growing like crazy and definitely not concerned with being polite. Record albums like George Carlin’s vulgar confessional Class Clown, Robert Klein’s erudite and nostalgic Child of the Fifties, and Richard Pryor’s raucous and unsparing breakthrough That Nigger’s Crazy had all been best sellers in recent years. Each of these artists had gained a following with a sensibility that was intensely personal and unconcerned with traditional notions of propriety.
San Francisco had been a comedy town before, and it was becoming one again. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was famous for nightclubs like the hungry i, where Mort Sahl and Bill Cosby held court; Ann’s 440 Club, where the volatile Lenny Bruce grew into a force of nature during his lengthy residencies; and the Jazz Workshop, where Bruce was arrested for obscenity after using what the abashed local newspapers could only refer to as a ten-letter word. (It was cocksucker.) Now as the city rode a larger wave of artistic renewal, it was ready to supply fresh faces and new venues. And in the span of about six months, one performer seemed to find his way into all of them.
Robin turned up at the Savoy Tivoli and the Old Spaghetti Factory, a pair of interconnected North Beach cabarets that had been beatnik magnets in the 1950s and now offered their space to acts like the improv troupe Spaghetti Jam. Debi Durst, a young comedian who was training with the group, saw Robin perform with them, and she came away impressed, envious, and motivated. “He would take your breath away,” she said. “I realized, this guy’s got more than improv—he’s had real training. Because he had a voice. With enunciation. He could do all these characters and pull all this stuff out of nowhere. From everything else I had seen, it was like, ‘Ah, this looks too easy. I could get onstage and destroy these people.’ But playing with him would be a challenge.”
During one Spaghetti Jam show at the Savoy Tivoli, the group’s director, John Elk, put Durst together with Robin, because they each had high-pitched little-kid voices in their comic repertoires. “He took both of us by the hand and led us out onstage,” she recalled. “He goes, ‘All right, your mother and I are going out to dinner, and we want you kids to behave. We’ll be back in a little bit.’ That’s all he had to say. He just left the stage, and I looked at Robin. It was like, here we go. It’s a free-for-all.”
Other comedy novices found Robin’s prowess intimidating. “The first time I did improv with him, I couldn’t keep up,” said Mark Pitta, who first encountered Robin in Spaghetti Jam. “I turned out to be his audience, onstage. It was very embarrassing. He used to sweat, and he reeked. So I wanted to get offstage for two reasons. One is, he stinks, and the other is, I’m not doing well.”
When Durst found out that Robin had recently studied at Juilliard, she said it “just totally boosted his esteem in my eyes. I thought, whoa, that’s like saying you studied with God or something.” But his elite education and his family’s wealth did not alienate him from the other members of the group. “It was all about who was going to buy a pitcher of beer at the Savoy after the show,” Durst said, adding that Robin would never be that person. “He had like one pair of pants, two pairs of pants. And he was constantly borrowing money because he didn’t like to carry money with him. We were always like, ‘Okay, I got the buck-fifty, I’ll pop for the pitcher. If you don’t have any money, that’s fine.’ We had the rest of our lives to be crazy.”
Meanwhile, Robin was also appearing frequently at the Other Café, a storefront and onetime pharmacy built into the corner of a Victorian house, where he performed with an improvisational comedy group called Papaya Juice. The group often went on the road to Bay Area colleges and was willing to appear at just about any room where a crowd could be assembled. “We just wanted to play, just to practice the art, so to speak,” explained Tony DePaul, one of its members. “Somehow or other, we got booked into doing a show for the YMCA, practically for nothing. We go down there and it’s all Chinese people who don’t speak English, so you can’t really do improv. Robin started running around the room, making funny sounds and voices, and they liked him, so we just watched him for fifteen minutes and then we left.” On another occasion, DePaul said, the troupe performed at a Department of Motor Vehicles office, “because people are waiting in line and that meant we could tell them jokes. You’ve just got to learn to do it.”
Dana Carvey, then a college student at San Francisco State, had been harboring his own secret dream of becoming a stand-up—one that he felt too introverted to act on—when he happened to catch Robin performing a solo set as part of a comedy show at a Berkeley café called La Salamandra. “The fourth guy up blew the room away, and it was Robin,” Carvey recalled. “It was so free-form, I’d just never seen anything like it. His voice didn’t need amplification. He had kind of a British accent. He was very shy and quiet, until he wasn’t.”
“People always said he could get away with anything,” Carvey said. “He’d do an improv and touch a woman’s breasts—‘Oh, titties’—and somehow it was fine when he did it. That was his explosive thing. Offstage, in a small group, he’d be so shy and so quiet. One side of you is just a monster onstage—the other is painfully awkward, really. The charisma of Robin came from these battling forces.”
San Francisco comics could also get exposure at the Boarding House, a music club in Nob Hill, whose owner, David Allen, allowed Robin to open for the rock bands booked there, and at dedicated stand-up spots like the Punch Line, which Bill Graham would establish in the Financial District. At the Open Theater, a performance space on Clement Street frequented by magicians, jugglers, and belly dancers, Robin opened for Rick and Ruby, a comedy rock-cabaret group.
But for authentically in-the-know joke-slingers, there was only one place—one lovingly well-worn, lived-in, beer-stained malodorous shithole—that they regarded as their true home and hangout, and that was the Holy City Zoo.
A claustrophobic performance space of about ten feet by one hundred feet, which at its official seating capacity of seventy-eight was frequently packed with twice or three times as many people, the wood-paneled venue took its name from a sign that its original owner had found in a small community in the Santa Cruz Mountains, called Holy City, where its wildlife preserve was going out of business. Once a jazz and folk music club, the Zoo now offered frequent comedy nights. John Cantu, who programmed its Sunday night open-mic comedy shows and gradually colonized the rest of its schedule, had served in the army during the Vietnam War, and he took a blunt but enthusiastic approach to promoting his shows: when he needed to drum up business he would walk along Clement S
treet bellowing “Comedy! Comedy! Comedy!” at passersby.
Cantu’s personal tastes determined who received the choicest time slots at the Zoo, but just about anyone who wanted to play on its stage was given the opportunity. “If you signed up by eight thirty, they would guarantee you a spot,” explained Don Stevens, a comedian and house emcee. “It might be at one thirty in the morning in front of the staff, but you were guaranteed a spot.”
As one night’s bill wore on until about two a.m., Robin was onstage trading quips with Michael Pritchard, a hulking former army medic, for an enthusiastic audience while a lone performer waited in the wings. Because the Zoo had guaranteed this eager humorist a spot, Stevens said, “I asked him, ‘Do you want to go on?’ And he said yes, because he was convinced, wow, what a great crowd. I had to actually kick Robin Williams and Michael Pritchard offstage. They left, and the guy got up to perform to people’s backs as they walked out of the club. I went to Robin afterward to apologize, and he was quite gracious about it. Those were the rules. He was fine with it.”
Here, as in so many of the clubs he passed through, Robin became one of its most exciting prospects, a whiz kid who could make you wait for hours on the chance that he might make an appearance. His routines seemed entirely off-the-cuff and different each time you saw him, but as those who worked closely with Robin knew, his true gift was not necessarily in being purely spontaneous but in creating the appearance of spontaneity.
“Robin just did a hundred little different pieces, as opposed to most of us that had one character that ran throughout,” said Tony DePaul. “Then he would start doing the improv and making stuff up, and as long as they kept laughing, he kept doing it. But as soon as it hit a snag, he’d go back and do joke number three and joke number four, and get ’em back. This way, he constantly was building his act.”
